


and they come unstuck

by heroisms (tiny_white_hats)



Series: 30 AUs [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Parents, F/F, Fluff, Minor Allison Argent/Isaac Lahey, Minor Malia Tate/Kira Yukimura, Past Cora Hale/Erica Reyes, Past Lydia Martin/Jackson Whittemore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-30
Updated: 2014-12-30
Packaged: 2018-03-02 17:34:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2820491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiny_white_hats/pseuds/heroisms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lydia meets Cora Hale on a Monday afternoon, crammed into one of tiny red chairs with legs shaped like crayons outside of Isaac’s classroom. She is pounding out an irate email to Greenberg from accounting for failing to get her the files she needed again, while she waits her turn, and is pointedly ignoring the other parents milling around the hallway, waiting for their own conferences.<br/>Another woman is looking down at her with half a smirk on her face, eyebrows raised as she eyes Lydia’s chair.<br/>“That seat taken?” she asks, gesturing vaguely at the equally child sized chair beside Lydia.<br/>“Not at all,” Lydia smiles.<br/>Or, that shamelessly fluffy Cora/Lydia single parents AU you didn't know you wanted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and they come unstuck

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rvst](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rvst/gifts).



> for [ kenfaidar](http://kenfaidar.tumblr.com) (rvst), who wanted light and happy and 'kids go to the same school AU'. I hope you enjoy it! It's a little dialogue heavy, as si everything I ever write, but I hope it's fun!
> 
> Lots of emphatic thanks to my beta [ dramakhaleesi](http://dramakhaleesi.tumblr.com), who was an absolute saint for helping me out last minute!

            Lydia meets Cora Hale on a Monday afternoon, crammed into one of tiny red chairs with legs shaped like crayons outside of Isaac’s classroom. She is pounding out an irate email to Greenberg from accounting for failing to get her the files she needed _again,_ while she waits her turn, and is pointedly ignoring the other parents milling around the hallway, waiting for their own conferences. She is in the middle of telling Greenberg from accounting exactly where he can shove the tax forms she needs if they’re not on her desk by the time she gets back to the office when somebody looms over her and clears their throat.

            “Just a moment,” Lydia snaps, before finishing the email, and looking up sharply.

            Another woman is looking down at her with half a smirk on her face, eyebrows raised as she eyes Lydia’s chair.

            “That seat taken?” she asks, gesturing vaguely at the equally child sized chair beside Lydia.

            “Not at all,” Lydia smiles.

            The other woman nods, and drops into the chair beside Lydia, maneuvering around in it to try and fit. Eventually, she gives up and throws her legs out in front of her as she scrunches into the tiny crayon chair.

            “Lydia Martin,” Lydia offers, extending a hand to the other woman. She takes the opportunity to look more closely at her, and all of a sudden is very interested.

            “Cora Hale.” Cora has a firm grip and a sharp smile, and Lydia can’t help but wonder if the curves of her hipbones and the notches in her spine are firm and sharp to match.

            “Are you here for a conference with Isaac?” Lydia asks. She tucks her phone away and crosses one leg on top of the other, turning to face Cora as much as she can in her cramped children’s chair.

            “Isaac?” Cora blinks at her, head tilting to the side.

            “Mr. Lahey, sorry.”

            “Yeah, he has my niece, Maggie, in class” Cora nods. “You?”

            Lydia nods. “My daughter Eleanor is in his class.”

            Cora smirks at her, looking like she wants to laugh. “So, ‘Isaac,’ huh? What, hot for teacher, or something?”

            “Hardly,” she snorts. “He’s my best friend’s husband. I’ve known _Mr. Lahey_ since college. So, ‘Isaac.’”

            “My story was a little more fun,” Cora shrugs.

            Lydia opens her mouth to respond, but Isaac’s head popping around the corner cuts her off. “Hey, Lydia,” Isaac smiles. “You’re up.” He raises an eyebrow at her choice of seat and smirks, “You can bring the chair with you if you’re comfortable.”

            “You’re still not very witty,” Lydia informs him primly, standing up and brushing off her skirt as Isaac laughs at her and walks back into his classroom.

            “Enjoy yourself,” Cora says with a lazy wink.

            Lydia grins back, showing all her teeth. “I already am.”

 

 *

 

            Allison and Eleanor are waiting for Lydia when she gets back from her conference with Isaac. It smells like they’ve been trying to bake and Lydia tries not to laugh preemptively, but it’s a lost cause the moment she sees her 32-year old best friend and her seven year old daughter, each liberally splattered with flour and cookie dough and looking hopelessly lost.

            Eleanor holds up a cookie for her when she approaches, and smiles with all of her gap teeth showing. “Here,” the girl smiles. “Aunt Allison and I made cookies.”

            “Thanks, sweetie,” Lydia says, crouching down to press a kiss to her daughter’s head. She looks up at her friend with a grin. “Hey, Allison. What’s the occasion?”

            “No occasion,” Allison says. “We just wanted to make some cookies. It was a nice change of pace after this week.”

            “Tough case?”

            Allison nods tensely. She doesn’t like to talk about her work in family law much, but Lydia knows it's tough, heartbreaking work.

            “Anyways,” Allison continues. “Do you have plans tomorrow night?”

            “No, but I don’t think I can get a babysitter on a day’s notice, Allison.”

            Her friend shrugs. “I bet Kira and Malia would love to take Ellie for the night if you asked. And you should try and come out; Isaac and I have a friend we want you to meet.”

            Lydia sighs so aggressively she can feel her lungs deflating. The number of friends Allison and Isaac wanted her to meet was obscene. This would be third date they’d set her up on this month, and probably the third failure, if their track record thus far said anything.  It was a little endearing to a point; Allison and Isaac were so incredibly happy together that they couldn’t imagine being happy without each other, and all they wanted was for Lydia to find somebody she could be that happy with. “No offense, Allison, but I don’t think I really want to meet another friend of yours.”

            “C’mon,” Allison says. “I think you’ll really like Caitlin.”

            “Yeah,” Lydia rolls her eyes. “And you thought I’d really like Heather, and Liam, and _Stiles._ ” Allison flushes at that last name, as she should, because never will she be allowed to live down the shame of the travesty that was her and Isaac’s attempt to set Lydia and Stiles up. It was easily the worst date of Lydia’s life, and she’d been on a truly impressive number of blind dates in the past four years since the divorce.

            “Look,” Allison says, and then pauses when her phone chimes. She tugs it out and glances at the screen quickly, her face lighting up in a smile that made Lydia a little afraid. “Never mind, forget about Caitlin. Why don’t you tell me about Cora instead?”

            Lydia kind of wants to slam Isaac’s head into a wall, but it wasn’t like she hadn’t expected this. Isaac and Allison tell each other everything, like the disgusting eternal newlyweds that they are, and if she was going to spend half of her parent-teacher conference with Isaac grilling him about hot mom Cora Hale and whether or not she was a hot single mom, then she had to expect that Allison would hear about it the moment Isaac had time to tell her.

            “Hey, Ellie, sweetheart?” Lydia deflects. “One more cookie, alright?”

            “Okay.”

            “Do you have your book with you? It looks like a good time to squeeze in some reading, don’t’ you think?”

            “Alright,” Ellie grins, swinging her legs back in forth on her stool as she finishes her cookie.

            “C’mon, Lydia,” Allison cajoled. “I tell you all my fun gossip.”

            “You don’t have fun gossip,” Lydia shoots back as she watches Ellie pull _The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe_ out of her backpack. “You’re boring and domestic, and your gossip is always about Isaac wanting a cat or getting yelled at by his students’ parents. Which, by the way, is not gossip. It's just another excuse for you to talk about your husband all the time.”

            Allison shrugs, not even trying to deny it. “Then you definitely have to tell me. Remind me what life was like before I became married and devoid of gossip.”

            “There is no gossip. There’s just another woman who has a kid in Isaac’s class, and I was curious.”

            “Is she hot?” Allison grins.

            “Very.”

            “Did you talk to her?”

            “Yeah. She seemed nice enough,” Lydia says. “Kinda funny.”

            “Huh,” Allison smiles. “I’m glad to hear that.”

            “Glad to hear what, Allison? I just talked to another woman. Not much to hear.”  

            Allison smiles and nods in a way that makes it very clear that she thinks that there is a lot to hear. But, Allison and Isaac don’t try and set her up on another date for the rest of the month, so Lydia puts up with her best friend's knowing looks and chalks it up as a win.

 

*

 

            A week and a half later it’s “Bring Your Parent to School Day.” Isaac had warned her about this at her Parent-Teacher Conference, but she is still unprepared to fold herself into the mob of parents clustered around the back of the classroom. Lydia has never bothered to make friends with any of the other parents, has no interest in joining something as mundane and useless as the PTO or worming her way into any of those social circles, and that is shockingly apparent as all of the parents buzz around her, greeting everyone but her.

            She spies Cora Hale standing at the back of the pack, slouched against the back wall with her hands tucked in her jacket pockets, glaring at her boots and intermittently glancing up to smile at a pale girl with dark hair and huge eyes. She looks very much like she wants to be left alone, so, naturally, Lydia goes to stand right next to her.

            “Cora, right?” Lydia asks, as if she hadn’t spent the past week asking Isaac about the other parent.

            “Yeah,” Cora nods, looking pleasantly surprised. Lydia smiles. She’s holding all the cards, knows all about Cora while Cora scarcely knows anything past her first name, and having all the knowledge and all the power makes everything feel so easy.

            “And you’re Lydia, yeah?”

            “I am.” Lydia surveys the other woman, looking her up and down in a completely unsubtle way. “Judging from the lack of a lab coat,” she says with a smile that feels predatory, “I’m guessing that you’re not a doctor.”

            “I’m a graphic designer,” Cora shrugs. “I guess there’s not really a uniform for that. You?”

            “Research physicist.” Cora doesn’t bat an eye. Usually she gets a once-over and a disbelieving stare that she, in her four inch heels and dress to match, is a scientist, but Cora just nods. Lydia appreciates it more than she thinks she can articulate it.

            “I failed physics in high school,” Cora says. Her lips are curling up into a smirk, and Lydia is stupidly attracted to it.

            “You’d be surprised how many people say that to me.”

            “I’m more surprised that there are people who don’t say that to you right off the bat. Physics was hard.”

            Isaac glares at her from the front of the classroom, very pointedly starting class, and both women try and suppress their laughter in the most mature, adult way possible.

            “Would you like to start us off today, Ms. Martin?” he asks with a smirk, raising both eyebrows at her smugly.

            “I’d love to,” Lydia returns, striding up to front of the class without a moment’s hesitation. She doesn’t think much of career day; it’s the first grade, none of these kids have any career ambitions beyond firefighter, astronaut, and President. Isaac told her over the weekend that he thinks it’s as useless as she does, but the school requires it. It’s a way to get the parents into the classroom, he’d explained, and Lydia supposes that it’s achieving that much at least. She’s not going to convince a single one of these six year olds that physics is their life’s calling, but at least she’s here, showing Ellie how to stand at the front of a room like you own it and how to do it in heels that would break a man’s ankle.

            She stands there and says her piece, ignoring the handful of dads at the back of the room who watch her like she’s an anomaly, watching the way Ellie grins at her and grinning back. It’s painless enough, just a three minute spiel on being a scientist, but there’s a little girl behind Ellie who is looking at Lydia like she had just changed the world, and all of a sudden, bring your parent to school day doesn’t seem so useless anymore.

            There is polite applause when she walks to the back of the room, and as that little girl behind Ellie beams at her, Lydia feels like she did something worthwhile, like she saved a cat from a tree or something else blandly kind, and it’s a rush to the system. She makes a beeline for Cora as a balding man in a polo shirt moves to take her place at the front, and she is fascinated by the way Cora is sinking her teeth into her lip as she just barely smiles, by the way her hair slips past her shoulders.

            Lydia isn’t sure whether she wants to swallow her whole or just comb her fingers through Cora’s dark brown hair for hours, but either way, all at once she wants to get coffee with Cora and lie with her head on Cora’s stomach and make fun of the other parents with her, and it’s a little dizzying.

            “Listen,” Lydia leans back against the wall beside Cora as the man at the front of the class begins to explain to all the kids the exciting work he does as an accountant. She wants to put a hand on Cora’s arm and immediately thinks better. It’s the most stereotypically mom-to-mom gesture she can think of, the most benign way she can imagine to learn just what Cora’s skin feels like under hers, but Cora doesn’t really look like she’s the type who’s ever in the mood for spontaneous touching. “I was wondering if you wanted to get coffee with me some time.”

            “What?”

            “I thought it would be nice to make friends with the other parents, spend time with someone who actually has a child, instead of people who just occasionally babysit mine.”

            Cora blinks at her and looks blindsided. There is a moment when she is silent, turning the proposal over in her mind. “Yeah, that sounds alright,” Cora says after a moment, and her face breaks out in a smile. She shows all of her teeth, like a snarl, and Lydia cannot believe just how much she wants this woman she doesn’t actually know.

            “Do you work tomorrow morning?”

            “I can be free around 11,” Cora offers. Lydia pulls out her phone to scroll through her calendar and decides 11:00 is close enough to free.

            “Excellent. I’ll see you then,” Lydia smiles, and pretends to listen to the woman talking at the front of the room about veterinary work. She spends the rest of Parents’ Day biting her lip to hold back a grin.

 

*

 

            It’s 11:08 and Cora is sitting alone at a table, checking her phone and running a hand through her hair, when Lydia finally bursts into Starbucks. She throws her coat over the back of the chair across from Cora and nearly collapses down onto the chair, heaving a sigh.

            "Office trouble,” she explains with a forced smile, waiting until Cora nodded and told her not to worry about it before walking to the counter. She wants to kick herself for an entrance like this, but Cora didn’t seem too worked up about it, so Lydia lets it go. She spends the entire 45 second wait for her drink looking back over her shoulder at Cora, inexplicably anxious, as if she’s worried that Cora will get bored and leave in the time it takes the barista to brew espresso and pour it into her coffee. It’s irrational, and she hates it.

            “I’ll be honest,” Cora says when Lydia finally sits down across from her. “I’m not really sure what you want us to talk about.”

            Lydia shrugs. “Nothing specific. I just thought it could be nice to talk. It’s not like I want to discuss the specifics of child rearing or anything, I promise.”

            "Nothing specific is good for me.”

            Cora takes a sip of her coffee, and despite herself, Lydia is fascinated by the way her lips curl around the edge of the mug, the way her throat moves as she swallows, the long line of her neck. It’s entirely frustrating to her how she barely knows this woman, yet she’s utterly consumed by everything about her. Cora is not even remotely her type. Lydia likes her men and woman buttoned up and designer, high achieving and higher stakes and as high powered as she is. Lydia does not like artists with day jobs, but, God, in her dark jeans and too loose hair, Cora was looking exactly like Lydia’s new type.

            "You should tell me about yourself,” Lydia informs her, “Or your daughter. Maddie, you said?”

            "Maggie,” Cora corrects. “She's my niece, actually.” She shrugs, and Lydia realizes she must be peering curiously at Cora. She's too polite to ask, but it's hard not to feel at least a little curious after hearing something like that. “It's alright if you're curious. Everyone always is.”

            "Alright, I'm a little curious.”

            "My sister, Laura, died in a car crash a few years back, and somebody needed to take Maggie. My brother, Derek, is barely qualified to take care of himself, much less a live child, and he and his girlfriend are U.S. marshals and they travel a lot, so it wouldn't have been a good idea. Erica, my girlfriend at the time, thought we were completely ready to be parents, and convinced me I should adopt Maggie.”

            "What happened there?” Lydia asks. She thinks about offering condolences, but Cora doesn't strike her as the type to appreciate strangers’ sympathy, and she doesn't look like she’s interested in it now.

            "Erica decided she wasn't ready to be a parent. She was probably right.”

            "That's sucks,” Lydia says.

            “It happens,” Cora says, not quite smiling, but not looking unhappy either. “Now, c’mon. What's your tragic backstory? Everyone has one.”

            "Okay,” Lydia grins. “I got married at 25, and then I got divorced at 28. Is that good?”

            "That's great. What happened?”

            "Jackson realized that being a parent meant the world didn't revolve around him anymore, and he ran,” Lydia says bitterly. That's not really a far explanation of what had happened to her marriage, but Lydia’s not really feeling inclined to be all that charitable to Jackson any more. Things had been more complicated than parental anxiety, but Jackson had turned tail and ran on her, after doing his best to make them both miserable, and that was that. “He's in London, now. I hope it's raining.”

            Cora snorts when she hears that. Lydia thinks it's a little adorable.

            “Fuck him,” Cora says.

            "Oh, absolutely,” Lydia laughs. “But, to be fair to Jackson, it never would have worked out. We were both a little too high-maintenance for each other.”

            "You don't seem to hard to handle to me,” Cora smirks at her, raising her eyebrows in what feels a lot like a challenge to Lydia.

            "I’ll surprise you,” Lydia laughs.

            "Try me,” Cora says, and this time it's definitely a dare. Lydia thinks she might just have to take her up on it.

 

*

 

            “You should just go for it,” Allison shrugs, draining the rest of her beer. “What have you got to lose?”

            Kira returns to the table, carrying a tray with a round of shots on it, and Lydia grabs a shot and gulps it down before Kira can even set her tray down.

            “Are we still talking about Lydia’s not-girlfriend?” she asks, perking up when Allison nods.

            “First of all, she’s not my not-girlfriend. Secondly, are we even allowed to talk about this on girls’ night out? If Allison isn’t allowed to talk about Isaac, you shouldn’t be allowed to ask me about this, either.”

            “I’m allowed to talk about Malia,” Kira shrugs, looking unimpressed. “The rules are no boys, not no significant others.”

            “Malia comes to girl’s night half the time,” Lydia shoots back. “She doesn’t count.”

            Allison blinks at her, unimpressed. “Kira’s right and you know it. Besides, Isaac is boring. Your hot mom friend is interesting.”

            “You’re a terrible wife,” Lydia sniffs.

            “No, I’m a great wife,” Allison counters. “But that doesn’t mean that you want to hear me talk about how Isaac tried and failed to learn DIY carpentry last week, or how we joined a book club, or how consistently excellent the sex is. Married people are boring; you pining after Cora Hale isn’t.”

            “I wouldn’t call in pining,” Kira offers. Lydia turns to thank her, but then she continues, “More like secretive longing from a short distance. Pining sounds sad, like Cora’s gone off to fight in the Great War and may never come home.” Kira and Allison laugh, and Lydia wants to thank her decidedly less.

            “I’m not pining,” Lydia snaps. “I have never pined in my life.”

            “Then why aren’t you doing something about it?” Allison challenges. This is why Allison has been Lydia’s best friend for over a decade. Allison challenges her and pushes her to be her best, and Allison knows when to stop pushing. She pushed at Lydia when Lydia realized she wasn’t happy being married to Jackson, when Lydia had made the truly tragic mistake of dating Stiles for a month, when she almost settled for corporate pharmaceutical job. Every time Lydia ended up somewhere she didn’t want to be, Allison pushed her, and Lydia pushed through.

            “Because I don’t know if I want to,” Lydia admitted. “You know, Cora is the only friend I have who knows what parenting is like, and the only friend I have who’s a single mom. And it’s not like you two seem eager to parent.”

            Kira shrugs. “Yeah, it seems unlikely that Malia and I are going to get pregnant any time soon.” Kira looks at Allison, and all of a sudden it’s clear that they’re both staring at Allison waiting for her to speak, when she wants to do nothing less that talk about this.

            “I don’t know if Isaac and I want to have kids,” Allison says in the smallest voice Lydia has ever heard her use. She’s looking down at the table and digging her nails into her knee, and Lydia feels like the worst best friend in the world for even bringing it up in the first place.

“Right!” she exclaims, doing her best to pull the focus back of the conversation back on to her non-relationship and anywhere but on Allison or on parenting. “And I don’t want to ruin the only friendship I have with another parent, just because I think there’s an off chance I might want to date her.”

            “I think you should go for it,” Kira says sweetly. “The worst that can happen is that she says no, which isn’t the end of the world.”

            “I’m not worried about her saying no,” Lydia says. “Nobody tells me ‘no.’”The worst thing that could happen is that she says 'yes,' and I decide I'm not interested in the first place."

            “You should think about it,” Allison offers. “This could be a good thing. I know you don’t need to married or dating someone to be happy, but sometimes it’s nice to be happy with someone.”

            “Maybe,” Lydia agrees, and lets the conversation die.

            “Oh,” Kira exclaims, filling in the pause in the conversation. “So, my parents finally met Malia’s parents. It was…an event.”

            Allison looks over at her, asking silently if she’s ready to move on, and Lydia smiles at her, and listen to Kira explain how Malia’s parents might actually be scarier than Allison’s, who had legitimately taken Isaac on a tour of their gun collection the first time Allison brought him home from college, and might possibly be wanted criminals.

            They don’t talk about Cora again for the rest of the night, and that’s fine. There’ll be more than enough time to think about Cora later.

 

*

 

            The next morning, Lydia texts Cora, asking if she wants to bring Maggie over for a playdate. She replies within minutes, and they set a date for Thursday. Cora, it turns out, has remarkably flexible hours, and when you have Lydia’s job, you make your own hours. Scheduling isn’t that hard.

            What is hard is knowing what to say. Lydia is at a loss for words around Cora that is completely unexpected. It was almost like when she was first dating Jackson, and she never knew what the right thing to say was, or couldn’t figure out how to say it. That was years ago, an entire marriage ago, and Lydia hadn’t been that girl desperate for approval in over a decade.

            She isn’t sure where Cora stands, she realizes, and that’s the problem. Cora is an unknown quantity, the like of which she hasn’t had in her life in years. Everyone in her life is sorted and defined and she knows exactly how to speak to each of them. She doesn’t know where to sort Cora. There is an intrinsic difference between Cora-who-she-wants-to-date and Cora-who-she-wants-to-be-friends-with, and until Lydia decides which one this Cora is, she doesn’t know what to do about her.

            Cora comes to her door an hour later, Maggie tugging at her leg, and it doesn’t seem so hard to talk, now that she’s here. It’s easier this time. Coffee hadn’t been hard, but it hadn’t been easy, either, and Lydia thinks she might have this figured out. She drinks coffee with Cora on the sofa and tells her about how Greenburg had nearly destroyed a month’s worth of research the day before, and Cora laughs as they watch Ellie and Maggie race matchbox cars around the edge of the rug. Cora is crass in a way that her friends never are and she appreciates Lydia’s sharp-edged humor, and sitting beside her on the couch, Lydia realizes that this is Cora-who-she-wants-to-date, and she has been all along.

            That weekend they take their daughters mini-golfing, and Cora brings Lydia to her favorite diner for lunch on Monday and they both get milkshakes to go and spend a good thirty minutes walking back downtown instead of catching a train. Lydia brings Cora along to girls’ night at the bar with Allison and Kira and Malia, and Cora invites Lydia to movie night with her brother Derek and their friends, and Lydia spends the entire movie leaning into Cora’s personal space once she realizes that the Erica sitting on the other couch is the same Erica that had dumped Cora not all that long ago. Cora doesn’t really talk about Erica or about Laura, and that’s fine. Lydia hasn’t mentioned Jackson once since they went out for coffee that first time, and she mentions her parents about as frequently. It’s better this way, she thinks, not dwelling on the past. She’s already spent enough of her life obsessing over her failed marriage, trying to remember everything she might have done differently, trying to figure out exactly what she could have done to save it. After a while she realized that there wasn’t anything she could have done, Jackson wasn’t who either of the two of them wanted him to be, and he had used her to drive himself away, but even realizing that was more effort than she ever should have given him. Laughing over drinks with Cora about her brother’s miserable social skills is better than talking about how Cora’s ex was always around because they still had the same friends. She likes laughing with Cora.

            Allison teases her about it not long after she brings Cora out drinking with them the first time, saying it’s not like Lydia to take this long to go for something she wants. Lydia shrugs, says something about waiting to make sure Cora wants it to. And when Allison assures her that Cora does, Lydia says, “I think there are some things even I’m willing to wait for.”

            Allison grins at her, and calls dibs on Maid of Honor.

 

*

 

            It turns out that Cora Hale is a bizarrely competitive soccer mom. Which makes sense, now that Lydia thinks about it. Cora’s oddly intense about everything, so it makes sense that she’d be oddly intense about children’s intramural sports as well. Halfway through the game, Lydia realizes that she can be a bizarrely competitive soccer mom, too.  

            It is the first game since Ellie joined the team and it’s the first sports game of any kind Lydia has been to in years, maybe the first game since college, when she would go watch Jackson play lacrosse and pretend it didn’t bore her silly. All the players are six years old, but when Ellie and Maggie’s team scores Lydia cheers like it’s the World Cup, and Cora barks orders at the kids every time they lose the ball. Cora is not the coach, though she grumbles on at least three different occasions during the game that she’d be a better coach then the one they have, so the kids don’t listen to her when she yells suggestions, and they keep losing the ball, and Cora keeps yelling. It’s a vicious, if not unamusing, cycle.

            On the field, Ellie has the ball for the first time all game and she is making a break for it. Lydia’s breath catches in her throat when her daughter starts dribbling up-field, and then she is screaming encouragements that are nearly wordless as Ellie leaves the other kids behind. Breath is stuck in her throat and screaming out of her all at once, and she has to remember that this is a kids’ soccer game, but that is her daughter on the field, leaving all the other boys and girls in the dust.

            “Slow down, there,” Cora laughs beside her, as if she hadn’t been shouting at the entire team 45 seconds ago. “People might start to think you care about little league soccer.”

            Lydia scoffs. “Please. I care about everything my daughter does.”

            There is a countdown clock at the side of the field, (and since when did intramural elementary school soccer get a countdown clock?) and when Lydia looks up at it, they are running out of time. Ellie has the ball, running up the field, and there are 45 seconds left in the game but Lydia doesn’t know the score, because intramural elementary school soccer has a countdown clock but can’t be bothered to keep score. Ellie is nearing the goal, guarded only by a 6 year old boy who takes up barely a fragment of the goal, so when Ellie kicks, the ball slips right by him into the net. Lydia screams when her little girl scores her first goal, turning to grin at Cora in her excitement.

            Cora is watching her with a look of such warm fondness that it hurts Lydia’s heart that she’s not lining her body up against Cora’s to fit their mouths together to kiss. So, she does, nudging into Cora’s personal space and kissing her before she has a chance to think it through. Cora’s lips turn up into a smile against her own, and, God, Lydia has wanted this for so many days now. Cora is solid and warm under her hands, and she wants to keep her palms pressed against the curl of Cora’s hip and the dip of her spine forever.

            “Did we win?” Lydia asks when she finally pulls back, staying close enough to Cora that she can feel her breath against her lips.

            “It’s little league soccer, Lydia. I don’t think they keep score.”

            “Okay, but did we win?” she repeats,

            “Yeah, sure,” Cora laughs. “I think we won.”

            “Good,” Lydia purrs, twisting her fingers in the collar of Cora’s shirt and pulling her back once more. “Nobody likes a loser.” She kisses Cora again, the other woman’s fingers brushing against the skin of her waist while Lydia curls hers around Cora’s hip, and she feels like the real winner on this field.

**Author's Note:**

> Come shout with me about rare pairs and human AUs on [ tumblr](http://meters%20reeds.co.vu). I'm always down to talk about both of those things.


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